My research has long
reflected a belief that even the most aesthetic or, to use a
variation on the Spanish word, aestheticist (esteticista) of
all literary movements is rooted in its socio-cultural context, a
socio-cultural context that almost always reaches beyond national
borders. The international factors that affected the development of
Spanish American literary movements are particularly salient since
the nineteenth century. During this period the cross currents of
ideas, events, and inventions transcending national boundaries
became swift and strong. In my last major study, I showed that
modernismo arose as a confrontation with and a response to
modernizing forces that swept across Spanish America as it entered
the world economy. These forces, which came from all directions,
transformed Spanish American life in the second half of the
nineteenth century. While the growing confidence in technology,
industrialization, science, and materialistic progress offered the
basis for great optimism, it also created both a social and a
spiritual crisis, the latter resulting from a loss of faith in
traditional beliefs and a hunger for spiritual certainty. In that
study, I proposed that not only the sense of loss and alienation
felt by modernista writers resulted from international
factors but that the responses that they formulated had also been
influenced from abroad. There I focused, like most critics of
Spanish American modernismo on European models. Though
greatly affected by these models, modernismo goes beyond
these trends to create an original, uniquely Spanish American
literature in which the goals for language are dual, that of
revealing profound realities concealed by the inflexibilities of
scientific methods and the stultification of everyday life and that
of providing insights into politics, power, and national
identity.

For the culminating
endeavor of the Fellows’ Seminar that I helped co-direct, I
want to underscore some of the ways that the seminar has affected
my research. Most significantly, I wish to indicate how I have
begun to look North as much as East to define the context in which
Spanish American authors wrote. In this article, I will focus on
Delmira Agustini, a late modernista and the first major
female poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Delmira Agustini
is known almost as much for her short and tumultuous life as her
creative and openly erotic verse. As you will recall, Agustini was
born in 1886 in Uruguay and published three volumes of verse by the
age of twenty-eight, at which point she was killed by her
ex-husband, whom she had taken as a lover. However provocative
these biographical details may be, I will not concentrate on
Agustini’s life but on her poetry. In particular, I will
explore the relationship between Agustini’s innovative poetic
discourse and the changing gender roles and sexual mores of the
day. I will also examine the unusual way that Agustini’s
writing builds upon the tradition begun by earlier
modernistas of questioning and critiquing predominant
ideological and cultural conventions. These discursive conventions
are found both in the language of nation-state formation that
circulated at the turn of the century and within modernista
poetry itself.

The sense of crisis to
which modernismo offered a response resulted from the
integration of Spanish America in the world economy and the opening
of its borders not only to new modes of production but also to new
ideas and images. In a recent article, Carla Giaudrone examines how
the resulting social instability set into motion two opposing
forces. The first was constituted by the established patriarchal
authorities, who wielded power and controlled acceptability and
participation in society. The second, countervailing force
consisted of those who fell outside the limits set by the
controlling authorities. As she sees it, modernista authors,
writing in opposition to the dominant bourgeois perspective, wound
up opening a cultural space for those excluded from social
involvement. Significantly, however, modernistas tended to
straddle these two groups. They may have given an opportunity for
speech to the marginalized of society, that is, to the outsiders or
to those whom Giaudrone labels “el otro,” but they also
maintained a strong desire to become fully incorporated into the
ranks of the ruling class. This ambivalence is a disconcerting but
undeniable feature of modernismo, one left unmentioned by
Giaudrone. Her portrayal of the situation, nevertheless, goes to
the heart of the issues of participation and privilege.

This struggle over the
language of personal and national self-representation is at the
center of the far-reaching ideological readjustments that dominated
Spanish American life at the end of the nineteenth century. It is
part and parcel of the crisis ushered in by the shift toward
positivism and its endorsement of utilitarianism, materialism, and
progress. If progress meant modernization, Spanish American
intellectuals were forced to consider how much of it they wanted
and, if their countries were not achieving all that they desired,
what were the roots of that failure. As Michael Aronna has shown,
the language used to discuss these issues develops during the
Enlightenment and in the recourse by thinkers like Kant to models
in the biological sciences. The metaphor of maturation, through
various intermediate steps and influences, is turned first into the
inverse central trope of degeneration and decadence and then into
one of disease (11-33). The policies and programs based on this way
of thinking “permeated,” as Aronna points out,
“the private and public spheres, rigidifying and antagonizing
relations between the sexes, social classes and ethnic
groups” (11).

It is over the role of sex
in general and femininity in particular that the presentations by
Aronna and Giaudrone come together. From the perspective of the
ruling elites, sexuality and passion are deemed a threat to the
well-being of the community, for they create distractions from the
rational execution of the goals of the state. Femininity is
similarly associated with irrationality, as well as with weakness
and immaturity, aspects of human nature that were deemed in need of
regulation if not eradication. Modernismo became the voice
of the excluded, because it actively sought to open the door to the
possibilities of the irrational and the spiritual, as well as the
beautiful, the artistic, the anti-utilitarian. The inclusion of
sexual references as a part of its counterdiscourse, results from
of a number of factors that are not discussed by either Aronna or
Giaudrone but that are equally significant.

It is important to
remember that the recourse to the stories and imagery of sexual
desire to challenge or affirm social conventions has operated quite
consistently throughout the course of time. More specifically, as
noted by Octavio Paz in Los hijos del limo, the exaltation
of the natural order of things, especially sexuality, became for
many romantics a means of by which they formulated a moral and
political critique of civilization (56-60). For this very reason,
modernismo’s adaptation of and incorporation of erotic
tales and sexually charged language provide insight into its
multiple and complex goals, some of which are spiritual and some of
which are political. The opening of a space for more marginalized
individuals, including women, is an important by-product of
modernismo’s answer to the predominant perspectives of
its time.

Delmira Agustini obviously
responded to this openness. Yet many other factors –some
poetic and some socio-political– contributed to her ability
to participate in the intellectual circles of the day.[1]
The language that she uses, however, does not reflect the
positivistic discourse that appears to have made her participation
possible. It is, what I would characterize as an eroticized
response to Rubén Darío.

The inroads of liberal
thought that operated in opposition to the hegemonic, patriarchal
premises that dominated life in nineteenth-century Spanish America
were altering daily life and played a key role in the modernization
process mentioned before. Along with the arrival of science and
technology came new ideas about education, trade, language, and
women. Along with the steamship, the railroad, the trolley, the
dirigible, immunology, analytic chemistry, the telephone, the
telegraph, the phonograph, and numerous other scientific and
technological advances came progressive beliefs with regard to the
nature and role of woman.[2] In addition to countless
articles about the advantages of educating and employing women,
there even appeared a few daring suggestions regarding the
elimination of the double standard and the possibilities of free
love.[3]

The sexual freedom that
had been probed quite openly by the European decadent authors of
the nineteenth century had received a mixed welcome in Spanish
America. Many writers could not overcome their Catholic upbringing
and their sense of guilt. Others sought to cloak overt sexuality in
the language of religion and spirituality. Others steered clear
altogether of these radical possibilities. The new
“scientific” exploration of sexuality and feminism,
however, took on a totally different guise. The new rational,
analytic approach to female sexuality is illustrated in the
following passage.

For many the model for
these changes was the United States, which, depending on the
perspective taken, was either the enlightened guide or the inspired
devil. One of strong supporters of the ideas coming from the United
States was Clorinda Matto de Turner. Perhaps best known as the
author of Aves sin nido, she established several journals
throughout Peru. In Buenos Aires, she founded Búcaro
americano and became the director of the Escuela Comercial de
Mujeres, which was created during the last decade of the nineteenth
century by the Ministro de Instrucción Pública de la
Argentina (Glickman, Fin de siglo, 26). In an article
published in Búcaro americano in 1896, she cautiously
points to the United States as a paradigm for the changes that
could eventually reach Spanish America.

Another example of how the
United States became associated, at least in the press, with the
pragmatic and rationalist model for the treatment of women appears
in an article under the by-line of Eva Angelina.She writes: “El día en que el
varón se convenza de que la mujer ilustrada, lejos de ser
inútil para el hogar, no sólo la realza sino que su
beneficio se hace extensivo hasta los que la rodean, tendremos
leyes que nos protejan como las de los Estados Unidos de
Norteamérica” (quoted in Glickman, Vestales,
106).

Besides receiving the news
of progress made in the United States, writers like Agustini were
exposed to ideas that were taking root within Uruguay and other
Spanish American countries. In particular, political, social, and
economic changes under José Batlle y Ordóñez
(president from 1903 to 1907 and from 1911 to 1915) provided
fertile ground for the development of feminist tendencies and the
support of free love. As Christine Ehrick has pointed out, the
workers’ movement in Montevideo produced an anarchist press
in which “abundaron artículos relativos a la
opresión de la mujer y la necesidad de subvertir la
estructura burguesa de la familia” (231). In response to
traditional marriages, these writers proposed the option of
“free love,” which some even went so far as to suggest
was related to women’s rights to sexual pleasure (Ehrick,
231).

These liberal ideas might
have found a more receptive environment in Uruguay than in other
Spanish American countries because of the weakened position of the
Catholic Church.[4] Nevertheless, the openness
described lasted only a short time on the social scene in Uruguay,
before being suppressed by the patriarchal establishment. For
Agustini, however, its imprint seems to have continued and combined
with the sexually charged language and images of earlier
modernista writers. Giaudrone goes so far as to suggest that
the modernismo practiced in Uruguay at the turn of the
century is unique in the way that it situates the body at the
center of its poetics, sexualizing writing (262).

This tendency is
highlighted by Herrera y Reissig’s El pudor. La
cachondez, which was written between 1901 and 1902 but which
remained unpublished until 1992. These two sections of what was to
be a larger work called Los nuevos charrúas,
referring to the native Americans of Uruguay, contain explicit,
outrageous, ironic commentaries on the hypocritical social and
sexual behavior of both men and women. As the editors of the 1992
edition make clear, this writing reflects “un particular
impulso erótico que briosamente recorrió el ambiente
cultural del novecientos montevideano” (14-15). A brief
example of what this work offers in terms of revealing a less well
recognized side of Uruguayan life as well as of the
modernista movement comes from the section entitled
“La cachondez,” in which Herrera y Reissig describes
with gusto the unconventional pleasures in which certain female
contemporaries indulged.

Though Los nuevos
charrúas was not published at the time, what I quote
reflects the attitudes that permeated the literary circles at the
time that Agustini was beginning to write and may have facilitated
her interaction with other writers. It certainly influenced her
linguistic options. The sexualized language that is associated with
Agustini’s writings does not, however, appear in her poetry
immediately. It develops, I believe, in and through her literary
dialogue with Rubén Darío, with whom she maintained a
correspondence and whom she set up as a mentor, model, and even
eroticized other. All the while, she sustained the social
“persona” of “La Nena,” the image of the
infantilized female which would meet with public
approval.

My current work sets out
to elucidate this new poetic discourse of female liberation through
careful analysis of Agustini’s poetry. My research shows that
Agustini sets up sexual behavior as a way of appropriating
Darío without surrendering herself to his work. As has been
explored in other studies, such as Girón Alvarados’s
Voz poética y máscaras femeninas en la obra de
Delmira Agustini, Agustini struggles to find a place for
herself, a “poetic voice,” in the no-[wo]man’s
land between the assimilated patriarchal discourse of the day and
her own sense of self as a woman and poet (3). While critics have
repeatedly underscored the growing sexualization of her language
not only as a breakthrough for Hispanic poetry but also for female
writers, I believe an important feature of this development has
been overlooked. Agustini, more than simply coming to affirm in her
poetry her sexual nature and rejecting the limitations placed upon
her by traditional views of women, sets up a creative conceit to
deal with her personal “anxieties of influence.” She
chooses a sexual model to combat the sense of weakness and
ineffectuality suggested by imitation. She turns herself into a
seductress and a partner and, in this way, rewrites from a female
perspective much of the sexual images that run throughout
Darío’s work. It is an imaginative leap influenced by
her immediate socio-cultural and literary context. It is a response
to the strong male patterns that surrounded her and, in an
unconnected but contemporaneous coincidence, parallels Oswald de
Andrade’s recourse to the language of cannibalism to provide
a striking new metaphor for dealing with European cultural hegemony
in Brazil.

Turning cultural
stereotypes on its head, Andrade’s “cannibalism”
exalted transgression against patriarchal society and extolled
Primitivism.[5] Attacking the vices of what passed for
civilization, Andrade held that “[t]he spirit refuses to
conceive the spirit without its body” and proposed
spontaneity and instinct as the factors by which Brazil’s
social, economic, and cultural evolution should be judged
(Pontiero, 251-252). Perhaps more to the point, the Brazilian
Modernists redefined themselves through the central metaphor of
devouring assimilation through which the new body of “native
originality” came into existence. Through this powerful turn
of phrase, they were no longer dependent imitators but rather
resourcefully aggressive creators.

I am certainly not saying
that Agustini was influenced by Andrade and the Brazilian
Modernists, but Agustini’s response parallels
Andrade’s. Writing at about the same time (the
“Manifesto Antropófago” was published in 1928)
both authors were trying to find an assertive way of addressing the
crushing power of cultural influences of established arrangements.
Agustini, for her part, does not consume Darío but she does
not surrender to his power either. She resists playing the role of
the “female writer” and she resists the subservience
that would have been expected of her as a woman and as a disciple.
She enters into a literary relationship that was made possible, at
least in part, by the political discourse of the day, a discourse
that gave women a new relationship to male hegemony.

This stance goes a long
way toward explaining a number of issues that have plagued critics
since Agustini began to be acknowledged as a major literary force.
Critics have struggled to reconcile her public persona as “La
Nena” with the overt eroticism of her poetry. What I am
proposing is that the image that she sought to project in public in
no way should be expected to correspond to what she aspired to
address in her poetry. Recognizing that at least some of the
sexuality of her poems is a way of writing herself into the
modernista canon reveals the fruitlessness of bouncing back
and forth between poet and public persona. Neither simply a
reflection of inner desires nor a portrayal of personal activities,
Agustini’s female voice speaks to an effort to redefine,
through language, what women can seek to achieve.

While there is in this
endeavor a transcendent vision, it is not the type of transcendence
that has been offered as an explanation for Agustini’s
aggressive sexuality. Critical appeals to the traditions of
mysticism appear most often as an attempt to neutralize her lustful
evocations and bring them into accord with the image of “La
Nena.” By the same token Agustini’s sexual imagery does
not fall within the erotic mystical tradition epitomized by
Darío’s recourse to esoteric visions of androgyny,
which, for all intents and purposes, is converted by Darío
from a vision of fusion into one of male domination. Quite the
contrary, Agustini’s stance provides an assertive, eroticized
answer to patriarchy in general and to Darío in particular.
In this way it presents a dynamic metaphor for female creativity
that goes beyond the “mad woman in the attic” of
Gilbert and Gubar or the Oedipal structures of Bloom. As Gilbert
and Gubar have recognized, authorial insistence upon the link
between maleness and creativity undergirds the recourse to the
Oedipal language of family ties to define the relationship between
poets (6). Agustini answers the language of male authority and male
creativity. In doing so, she speaks for a new type of female poet,
one that is personally and artistically self-affirming, inspired by
factors that crisscross the entire hemisphere.

Aronna,
Michael.“Pueblos
Enfermos”: The Discourse of
Illness in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish and Latin American
Essay. Chapel Hill, North Carolina:
North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures,
1999.

Bloom, Harold. The
Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.

[2]For an overview of the changes occurring in
Spanish American during the end of the nineteenth century, see
Glickman, Fin del siglo, 4-47.

[3]See, for example, the article by Santiago
Locascio published in Germen and quoted by Glickman in
Fin del siglo, 331-332.

[4]Russell H. Fitzgibbon indicates three historic
or demographic factors that contribute to this situation:
“effective Spanish colonization did not begin until the
eighteenth century, by which time the religious fervor of the
earlier generations and centuries had in considerable measure
atrophied; during the colonial period Uruguay remained largely an
ecclesiastical appendage of Buenos Aires, and its intensity of
spiritual development and devotion was correspondingly
diminished...In the second place, the revolutionary period was
characterized by a large influx of foreigners, especially English
and French, who were either non-Catholic or only nominally
Catholic. Third, the large immigration beginning late in the
nineteenth century, while it came in great part from Catholic
countries, represented social and economic strata which were often
of less than fervent attachment to the Church” (231).
Fitzgibbon goes on to explain that Batlle contributed to
Uruguay’s distance from the Catholic Church, for early on he
developed a skeptical attitude toward it and its beliefs
(213-215).

[5]For this discussion I am indebted to two
chapters from the Cambridge History of Latin American
Literature, the first “The Literary Historiography of
Brazil” and the second “Brazilian Poetry from
Modernismo to the 1990s” by Benedito Nunes and Giovanni
Pontiero, respectively.